Fields of Glory by Michael Jecks Read Free Book Online Page B

would keep a store. That way, if the French laid waste the farms before them on their
march, they would always have some food.
    While their cakes cooked, Berenger wandered amongst the other members of his vintaine, stopping and talking to each.
    There were too few. Grandarse had been right on that. Berenger was the leader of sixteen men, where there should have been twenty, fifteen excluding Ed – he couldn’t add Ed to the
complement. Not yet. Not until they’d seen how he would behave in a fight.
    Berenger saw a messenger pick his way across to Grandarse. The old man nodded and looked across at Berenger meaningfully. Picking up his hot oatcake, Berenger blew on it, saying, ‘Hurry up
and eat, boys. It looks like we’ll be working for our money today.’
    Béatrice walked slowly amidst the throng that day. A solitary young woman, with dank and matted hair beneath a tatty wimple, she attracted little attention. It was how
she liked it. For the first time in days she almost felt safe.
    She had left the weary men at the little chapel, where they deposited Hélène’s body for her. Since then, she had been trailing along with columns of refugees.
    Here, the rutted road was a mess of mud, human ordure and abandoned belongings. Men and women trudged along wearily, carrying their possessions on their backs, under their arms, or on small
carts. She saw a man with a tottering pile of tightly-bound bales of clothing crammed into an unwieldy barrow suddenly stop as the topmost ones fell into the mud. He stood, distraught, staring at
them, as though that was the ruin of his life, while the endless line of people passed by him without comment. No one could spare even a word of sympathy. Not now. Everyone was too scared: too
exhausted.
    A child of perhaps eight years was darting from one adult to another, snot running from her nose, crying and calling for her mother. One bent old woman, grey of face and hair, meandered from the
road and through a collection of nettles, and then slumped to the ground like one who had given up. Béatrice knew she would die there. And nobody would help.
    Béatrice herself was too weary.
    The whole world seemed on the move: everybody’s faces taut with fear, all so sunk in despair that they had no thoughts for others. Ahead, Béatrice saw a priest with his servants,
striding with the careful haste of a cockerel sensing a fox in pursuit, avoiding glances to either side in case he might see someone who needed his help. Here, surely, he should have paused,
prayed, offered some kind of assistance to these suffering people. It was his job, his God-given
duty
.
    Her experience at Hélène’s cottage had utterly destroyed her faith in the priesthood. They were
hypocrites
, she thought bitterly, demanding that others should help
their fellow men, but then averting their own gaze from those in need. Unless they could pay, of course. Like the priest who had offered to help her – but only if she would become his
whore.
    But today, the priests themselves were fearful. Peasants, burghers, even the rich were scared – and who could blame them? All were terrified of the English.
    The enemy would soon be upon them, and then the terror would start. Everyone knew what it was like to have an army arrive. The countryside would be devastated, fields and pasture would be
ravaged, local stores emptied, and the people . . . well, the people would be lucky if they lived. Stories of the depredations of the English were rife, and everyone had heard tell of their
behaviour in previous raids. They would ride over a wide front and slay all who stood in their path. If a town or city refused to let them in, they would have to suffer the torments of siege and
starvation, and if the place fell, their reward would be wholesale slaughter: men and boys murdered, women raped by whole companies of men, their children spitted on lances for the amusement of the
troops.
    So Béatrice walked unmolested among the people